Lowland Chontal Language and Cultural Heritage. A Documentation Project in the District of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Mexico.

Contributor:

Peter

Contributor (consultant):

Guille

Coverage:

Mexico

Date:

2004-09-03

Description:

A group of neighbor ladies helps the landlady to prepare tamales al pipil and bread, to be served during the feast in honor of the virgen del rosario. The landlady and her husband will be the host (mayordomos) of this annual festivity.

The "Lowland Chontal Language and Cultural Heritage Project" is a three-year linguistic and ethnographic documentation project (2004-2007) of the Lowland Chontal in the Mexican State of Oaxaca. It is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, Hanover, Germany, through its DoBeS program. Additional funding was generously provided by the UNESCO, section of intangible cultural heritage, Paris. The project is hosted by the Section of Mesoamericanist Studies, Archaeological Institute, of the University of Hamburg, Germany, through project director Prof. Dr. Ortwin Smailus.
The Goals of the project are both linguistic and anthropological, with principal investigators Dr. Loretta O'Connor (linguist) and Dr. Peter Kroefges (anthropologist). These goals include (1) A Chontal-English-Spanish dictionary, (2) a comprehensive description of the gramar of Lowland Chontal, (3) a documentation of the cultural heritage of the Chontalpa, with respect to traditional subsistence activities, territorial organization, landscape interaction, as well as fiestas and ceremonies, and (4) an electronic archive of all audio and video materials and related texts.
This archive includes resources from O'Connor's dissertation project at the University of California at Santa Barbara (1997-2001), and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nymegen, Netherlands, (2002-2004). It also contains archaeological and ethnohistorical data that formed part of the dissertation by Kroefges, and was funded by the Foundation for the advancement of Mesoamericanist Studies, Inc. Florida, and the University at ALbany, State University of New York.

The collector films a group of women at the home of his landlady, who help prepare tamales and bread for the upcoming fiesta of the virgen del Rosario. Tamales are portions of steamed corn dough, wrapped in maize leafs. The ladies chat mostly in Spanish.

This collector is a trained anthropologist/archaeologist. He speaks German, Spanish, and English, and only knows very few words in Chontal. In order to understand his consultants, Spanish is necessary.

This consultant is a mother of four. She speaks mainly Spanish but remembers quite a few phrases and terms in Chontal. She conducts a small business and is socially active among the village's women. She sponsored a mayordomia, a religious feast in honor of the Virgen of Rosario in 2004.